Monday 6 May
9:30 – 9:45 Welcome (coffee)
09:45 – 10:45 Krister Bykvist
Are collective harm problems coherent?
My aim is to provide a deeper understanding of collective harm problems, by asking and answering two questions: (i) Are collective harm problems coherent?; And (ii) can they be coherently managed by moral theory? The answers I shall argue for are: yes some are coherent, others not; and yes, but it is not clear how to proceed.
10:45 – 11:00 Break 15 min
11:00 – 12:00 Olle Torpman
Responsibility-Based Reasons to Act in Collective Impact Cases
What moral reasons to act could an individual have if her action will not make any difference? In this paper, I argue for the existence of responsibility-based reasons for individuals to act, and that these can help explain why an individual sometimes should act in so-called collective impact cases even if she cannot make a difference with respect to the outcome in those cases. I distinguish between retrospective and prospective kinds of responsibility, and argue that (i) an individual has prospective responsibility-based reasons to act in a specific way in collective impact cases given that she will thereby avoid contributing causally to harm where avoidable, or contribute causally to good where desirable, and (ii) an individual has retrospective responsibility-based reason to act in a specific way in collective impact cases given that she will otherwise be blameworthy for making a (causal or constitutive) contribution to harmful outcomes in such cases.
12:00 – 13:30 Lunch
14:00 – 16:00 Säde Hormio (Book launch)
Taking Responsibility for Climate Change
Who has the responsibility to reduce climate change? Governments, corporations, international organizations. Yes! But, these collectives consist of individuals, and as members of collectives and groups of different kinds, individuals also have a responsibility to act. In her new book Taking Responsibility for Climate Change, philosopher Säde Hormio reminds us that we are not only influenced by the collectives we belong to – collectives are also influenced by individuals. Using both philosophical arguments and real-world examples, she pushes for the use of ethical arguments in public debate and in the shaping of climate policy. Säde Hormio is an Academy Research Fellow in Practical Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, and a researcher at the Institute for Futures Studies. Moderator: Aaron Maltais, Senior Research Fellow at SEI and Head of Policy and Road Mapping for the Secretariat for the Leadership Group for Industry Transition at SEI.
16:00 – 17:00 Mingle and snacks
18:00 Dinner (for invited speakers)
Tuesday 7 May
09:45 – 10:45 Vuko Andric
Between Reactionism and Utopianism: How Progressive Should Rule Consequentialists Be?
According to rule consequentialism, an action is wrong if and only if the action is forbidden by the authoritative moral code. The most prominent version of rule consequentialism, ideal rule consequentialism, holds that the moral code whose adoption would have the prospectively best consequences is authoritative. By contrast, actual rule consequentialism focuses on actually accepted rules or on actual patterns of behavior to determine the authoritative moral code. While ideal rule consequentialism is often accused of utopianism, actual rule consequentialism can be charged with reactionism. Can rule consequentialists strike the right balance between assigning relevance to ideal codes and actually accepted rules/actual patterns of behavior?
10:45 – 11:00 Break 15 min
11:00 – 12:00 Tim Campbell
Are there requiring moral reasons to create happy people?
For citizens of developed countries, the choice to have a child contributes more to CO₂ emissions than any other salient lifestyle choice. Since increasing CO₂ emissions raises the expectation of global harm, some have argued that for many people in developed countries, it is immoral to have children. Call this Climate Anti-Natalism. A common assumption in climate anti-natalist arguments is that there is no requiring moral reason to create happy people. Generally speaking, it is often assumed, an act can be impermissible if it imposes harm, or if it creates a happy person who is less happy than some other person whom one could instead have created, but an act cannot be impermissible just because it fails to create an additional happy person. I argue that if we accept this claim, we must reject at least one of three extremely plausible claims: (1) It is impermissible to create people with bad lives rather than create those same people (and others) with good lives, (2) one is not morally required to harm some person just to avoid inflicting less harm on that same person, and finally (3) there is a limit to how much harm any permissible act can inflict relative to the alternatives. Since we should accept (1)--(3), we should also accept the claim that an act can be impermissible just because it fails to create a happy person. But this undermines the central assumption of climate anti-natalist arguments.
12:00 – 13:30 Lunch
13:30 – 14:30 Internal meeting
14:30 – 15:30 Mark Budolfson
Puzzles regarding collective action and futility: Prospects for consequentialism, commonsense ethics, and other normative theories
I focus on a few familiar and less-familiar cases regarding ethics and collective action. I ask whether a straightforward version of consequentialism or commonsense ethics can deliver an attractive account of these cases, or whether a more complicated account is needed. I find myself attracted to a very straightforward version of commonsense ethics.
15:30 – 16:00 Coffee break
16:00 – 17:00 Karsten Klint Jensen
Climate Change, Collective Harm and Coordination
Climate change presents a collective action problem where self-interested agents will be motivated to free-ride. Parfit has suggested that moral solutions, where people become motivated not to free-ride, might be preferable to the standard political ones based on incentives, because they do not need enforcement. My aim is to examine this proposal for climate change.
First observation is that a moral solution involves a coordination problem which is much more complex than what Parfit envisages. However, the exact nature of the coordination problem depends on whether an individual agent makes a difference or not. Nefsky has recently summarized her general theory of this fundamental question of collective harm and applied it to climate change. Unfortunately, her theory appears incoherent and is also only allowing for two alternative acts, whereas an agent in the face of climate change has a wide range of alternatives.
I shall argue that Nefsky does not succeed in demonstrating that an individual agent does not make a difference. In fact, she keeps open the possibility that, under certain conditions, an individual might make a difference, in which case consequentialism would seem very demanding. I endorse this conclusion (but not the argument). This brings us back to coordination, which is needed to ensure a fair distribution of contributions.
However, a large-scale coordination problem comprising the entire world population faces severe obstacles. First of all, everyone has to become morally motivated. Next, the structure of the problem must become shared knowledge. These two steps will most likely involve transaction costs. Finally, it is not clear if there is a coordination equilibrium which will be perceived as uniquely best. It is hard to see that a moral solution could fare better than an economic one, which automatically ensures coordination between all agents.